Designers are a particular type of tourists. They travel to get inspired, to experience a foreign design culture that often inspires them in their creative practice and routine. Having lived, worked and studied in different countries, and constantly traveling to be part of design events around the world, I am very well aware of the positive effect that travel has on widening your design practice. It was after all the main reason for my design studio’s focus on cross cultural design. This is why I decided this year to start my first “Nomad office” experiment: Moving the office for one month to a new city, where we continue working and serving our clients as usual, yet benefiting from a new location to explore a new design culture. A one month change of location that allowed us to experience an environment in a slightly deeper way than typically shorter travel visits. Our choice this year was Barcelona, the Catalan capital that magically blends both metropolitan and small-town atmosphere. I share here my top design picks that intrigued and inspired my creative side.
Anonymous Sculpture on Platja de San Sebastian
Barcelona is the city of monumental art. Every city corner seems to have its own beautiful street sculpture: The surrealist “head” sculpture of Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein; Rober Llimós’s “Frame” sculpture; Antoni Llena’s curious “David & Goliath” sculpture; Miro’s Dona i Ocell and many many others. My personal favorite monumental street sculpture was by far the one at the Platja de San Sebastian, which to my surprise is an “anonymous” piece of art: It is not clear what the title of the sculpture is, and who is the designer behind it. My investigation with the locals didn’t lead me to any further info. In any case, this beautiful three dimensional design embodies the spirit of the 1992 Olympics games, ever present across the entire city.
Identity system at MareMagnum
You know that a visual identity is complete when even the signage icons are so unique and speak the same consistent visual language as the rest of the design elements. The visual identity at the MareMagnum shopping is such an example of consistent design. The iconic illustrations are recognizable, playful, functional and in line with the logo design and the rest of the identity system.
Els Quatre Gats
This famous Barcelona café might well be a tourist trap. It is in every tourist guide and one of the massively promoted highlights of the city. Yet I was encouraged to visit it because I wanted to see its printed menu, which seems to be designed by Pablo Picasso in one of his first commercial commissions. Picasso’s graphic design skills weren’t unfortunately what I expected. At least not in this menu, where his nice illustration is just stuck on its cover. A practical reminder of the specific differences between the world of fine art and the world of informational and typographic graphic design. The interior of Els Quatre Gats is however what I found most rich. And this relation between the mood of the café and its printed menu is what I wished could be more present: How would the graphic and typographic design of the menu reflect this rich iconic Modernista interior? It seems like a wonderful assignment to give for design students; or a nice challenge for anyone who wants to surpass Picasso in one way or another.
CosmoCaixa Museum
There are so many museums to see in Barcelona and to my surprise my favorite was not a visual arts museum, but the science museum CosmoCaixa. This most visited museum in Europe reflects the best practice of exhibition design: Navigation through the space is well planned and structured. Playful and engaging interactive design station cleverly presents all sorts of fascinating science areas. Information design and graphics are nicely implemented. A must visit for anyone interested in space design and creative experience design.
Billboard campaign
An advertising campaign with a strong graphic approach, good typography choice and simple iconic illustration is something advertising agencies in the Arab World could learn from. I enjoyed seeing this colorful campaign across the streets of the city. The campaign basically warned against penalties imposed on aggressive or inappropriate street actions. In Barcelona, everything fits but no everything is allowed.
Type Republic
As a type and typographic designer, I was obviously interested in researching the local type design scene. My favorite type design source from Barcelona remains Type Republic, founded by designer Andreu Balius. This independent type foundry provide type with a local flavor and even with a wider Mediterranean flavor.
Granja M Viader
Barcelona’s oldest milk bar, this charming cafe feels authentic and is actually delicious. The walls inside Granja M Viader are fully decorated by century-old advertisement. It gives the place a vernacular dimension, rightly reflecting its long history which started back in 1870. Besides enjoying the famous “Cacaolat” drink, the framed historical prints on the wall are a guarantee to keep any designer visually engaged. It is simply like being in a cafe with a special “history of graphic design” theme: Plenty of typographic details to look at; Logos from the 1930s; as well as expressive charming illustrations.
Urban Graphics
The Farmacia Nadal sign is just one of many beautiful examples of charming street typography, graphics and urban art. This specific example might be a very visible one, since it is located on the famous La Rambla street. Yet every corner of every street presents so much hidden street graphics to look at: Shop signs, Pictograms, graffiti, wayfinding icons, door numbers and all kind of real street art. Two books superbly document this. ”Barcelona Grafica”, by America Sanchez, features around 2000 well photographed and documented selected examples of urban graphic art. “Graphicity Barcelona” by Louis Bou, offers as well a visually stunning collection of street graphics.
Santa Caterina Market
It is not surprising to see great architecture in Barcelona. This is after all the city of Gaudi. But what makes the Santa Caterina Market a unique public space is the fact that it combines glorious architecture with a refined taste for colors. The market’s roof wave-like structure is covered a magic carpet of endless colorful ceramic tiles, creating a unique blend of graphical 2D design with 3D architectural design. It simply reflects the actual rich colors inside the market. This is a must see, particularly if you manage to see it from a window or balcony in the surrounding buildings.
There are definitely so many more inspirations from Barcelona. But what I listed above is what topped my notes in my sketch book. For now, next year’s “Nomad office” destination is the main brainstorming topic!
This entry was posted on Friday, October 22nd, 2010 at 11:22 am and is filed under Visual Culture, Type Design, Blogroll, Design, Various, Academic, Articles, Typography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 19, 2011
» Barcelona Design top picks | Arabic Type
» Panama & Venezuela Street Typography |
Lettering, stenciling and shop signs, as part of the urban typography that dominates the visual language of Caracas, capital of Venezuela. Photography by Hilda Mecharrafie.We travel, and always look at the street typography that defines the character of every city and new urban environment we experience. I enjoyed documenting the street graphics and typography in my latest trip across Panama, and so did Hilda in her travel in Venezuela. A quick preview shown in the images below, giving a taste of the rich typography in central and Latin America.
Preview of street typography from Panama.This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 11:49 am and is filed under Visual Culture, Design, Various, Typography, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Utrecht School of the Arts (KMT-HKU) | Arabic Type
New visual identity for the Utrecht School of the Arts (KMT-HKU)
For the past couple of years we have been working regularly on building the visual identity for the Faculty of Arts, Media and Technology at the Utrecht School of the Arts in the Netherlands (HKU). Since then, we have designed several of their publications as well as a series of sub-identities for specific academic programs initiated by the school as part of the whole visual identity.
Early in 2009 we were asked to develop a new visual identity for the Faculty in Hilversum. The school, with its expanding new programs, aimed at lifting its house-style through a new image. Their main objective was to visually accentuate the Faculty’s independence from the central school in Utrecht. Our creative process focused on achieving this goal by creating a solid and consistent identity, which we have been using this past year on a variety of printed and digital promotional material we designed for the school.
The visual style developed from combining rough manual sketches with bold tight-set typography and a bolder set of colors. The variety of hand drawn doodles used highlights the creative process of the students, and is meant as a contrast with their final outcome of digital media projects: Emphasizing hence on the sketching part of the process as a fundamental aspect in conceptualizing and visualizing digital media art. Our main challenge with the identity was to allow the usage of visuals from students’ projects, often stylistically different, without loosing the school’s visual identity or consistency throughout. This is another reason why typography acts as a main component of the identity, as it unifies different visual material regardless of variation in styles.
Among the different materials we designed were the vertical signature brochures of the school, which we printed on heavy-stock rough paper to enhance the raw feel of the visual identity and complement the bold typography and colors used. Other items we designed varied from animation, packaging, postcards, posters and stationery.
» Type Design for the Arab Museum of Modern Art |
Type Design for the Arab Museum of Modern Art
Since our start as a design studio, we have been heavily involved in designing original Arabic typefaces, and through our 10 years of design practice at Tarek Atrissi Design, we have left a visible mark on the typographic landscape. Our fonts are to be seen used across the Arab world, in print, on air, on newspaper headlines and as part of elaborate corporate identity systems. The last two years haven’t been an exception: we have designed several corporate and custom Arabic (and bilingual) fonts for different clients, many of which we haven’t posted yet on our blog or website.
One font I am particularly proud of and excited about is the font I am sharing in this blog post. The custom display font for the Arab Museum of Modern Art, “Mathaf”, a new museum opening today in Doha - Qatar through its inaugural exhibition “Sajjil”. The Arabic and Latin font is the result of months of intensive work, and is one of the main components in the visual identity and branding adopted for the museum.
Unlike many of the typical briefs we usually get for designing custom fonts, this typeface design commission for such a high profile organization was really out of the box. It challenged us to put into it the creativity and experimentation that we usually put into self initiated type design projects. The bilingual typeface we were asked to design was more of an artist experimentation: It had to look far from a digital typeface, but rather a hand scribble; a personal signature; a quick spontaneous-looking hand writing that looks more like a scribble taken from an artist’s sketchbook. This request was a particular design challenge. Especially for an Arabic font as anyone would imagine: Creating the illusion of a hand written scribble in a script that has connected letters was a tough task. Which might explain why as a matter of fact there aren’t this sort of digital Arabic fonts available out there.
The design process was very exciting and defined by experimentation. In the first phases of the project we explored all sort of manual lettering work. The focus was on finding the right formula to create a spontaneous writing style, while keeping in mind the challenge of matching the Arabic and Latin parts of the font to communicate the same spirit. There is basically nothing we did not try: Creating metallic brushes from Coca-Cola cans and writing with it; Graffiti writing on large newspaper sheets; Asking extended family to write quickly in charcoal pens; and looking in our archive for collected old Arabic newspapers which still used manual hand calligraphy for typesetting all headlines. Several design rounds made us finally use the outcome of a specific handwriting that filled in our stack of sketches. This material was scanned, digitized, and then developed and refined further to create the basis of the design. Twenty two rounds of presentations were needed to polish the final design. The final character set, particularly in Arabic, included a wide set of ligatures that allowed a more natural flow of the script. The final design echoed in one way or another some of the initial inspirations we used while developing this typeface: street hand made lettering that could be found in different sizes, forms and textures- and that I have for long documented as part of my visual research. Previews of the final font, as well as some selected samples of from the process, are shown as part of the images showcased here.
Above: Preview images of the process development of the designWithout being labeled as an Arabic font with calligraphic features or a font with contemporary typographic features, the Mathaf-script typeface is above all a font reflecting a personal expression. An expression that is maybe typical to any piece present in a Museum of Modern Art.
To me personally, regardless of the final outcome of the design, the simple fact that we were commissioned for this project is a double rewarding honor: On one hand, it is a confirmation that the type of Arabic fonts we have often focused on developing are highly in demand: Fonts designed by graphic designers for graphic designers; fonts that have strong characters and that are ideal for usage in corporate design and branding context, and that are designed to communicate a very specific mood or message. On the other hand, by being asked to take part of visualizing the written voice of “Mathaf”, we are in one way or another given the honor of being part of Arab modern art, typographically speaking at least.
Above: Samples of the font usage within the branding and identity system of Mathaf. Showing the countdown posters for the opening event; application of the font on pins and printed matters; and screenshots from promotional video using the font for on-screen titles.
